The Ship

The Ship seems to be an interesting and innovative title available via steam from Outerlight. Here is a snipet from the press release:

Outerlight’s anticipated unique murder mystery ‘The Ship’ is available for download from 11th – via the Steam network!

Welcome aboard The Ship, a new unique murder-mystery game for the PC.
But as one of many "lucky" recipients of a free ticket, you arrive on board to find there's a catch to your luxury cruise…

Set on a series of luxury, art deco cruise ships built by ‘Mr X’, this devilish game challenges you to kill or be killed. The rules of the hunt are simple: Each of you is given the name of one of the other contestants on board, and you must Hunt them down and kill them with any weapon you can find. But as well as having someone to Hunt, you have another player hunting you, so keep looking over your shoulder if you want to stay alive!

The full press release along with pics and vids will be on GHs homepage directly.




Below is a Q&A that you can read thru if you wish. If there are enough questions from you, then we can have our own q&a posted as well. If you would like to ask them a question feel free to email it to me at neil.s@gamershell.com. The sooner, the better.

Now on to the Q&A:


Interview with Ailsa Bates, the Operations Director of Outerlight.



Today the company has a team of 18 people, including industry experienced coders, artists and designers and will shortly publish it’s first commercial product, a First Person Shooter called The Ship, which has generated enthusiastic response from the gaming community.

Outerlight is a relatively young developer, which was founded in 2003. What was your vision for Outerlight when you set up the company?

We actually thought very hard about what we wanted the company ultimately to be. I read about other successful companies and we knew we had to be quite specific in our aims. We wanted to create a company which would create new IP and new game products but we didn’t want to be restricted by existing views of what games are. Games can be hampered by genres and the idea that only young males play them, limiting the kinds of games that publishers are prepared to invest in. It seemed clear to us that the demographic could be broadened if only more interesting games were made. We therefore set out to create a company that would stretch the boundaries of how games are perceived and who plays them. We wanted to create inspiring games that would themselves spin into movie licenses, rather than the other way around. We also wanted to create a highly profitable company and although risky, creating a brand new IP with unique game play is still a good route to high profits and a trade sale for a new company. We also did not want to be financed by games publishers: the majority of development companies who have gone under in the last few years have all had the plug pulled on their projects by publishing partners, leaving them in an untenable position financially. We knew we wanted to raise private investment to create our product thereby giving us the freedom to create the games we could imagine and also allowing us financial independence from our publishing partners. We knew that we’d get higher royalties from game sales if we self funded. So far we have achieved all our aims and have raised over £1 million in funding. With “The Ship” almost ready to launch we’re at a very exciting period: the time when we see if the public like what we’ve made!

Can you talk us through some of the key people involved in the project? What kind of heritage does the team have?

The Managing Director, Chris Peck, is also the companies Creative Director and he is the driving force behind the games we make and the company itself. The company was initially his idea and was fuelled by his frustration with the tendancy towards uninspiring game design within the industry. His background was as a games designer at another Scottish company, Vis Entertainment in Fife, and he was a key player in creating the hit game “State of Emergency”. His game ideas are very original but also very focussed on the user experience, logical coherence and depth of game play which can change a good game into a great game. Ed Wilson, Technical Director, was also one of the founders (along with myself) and his broad technical knowledge ranging across hardware, software, Internet technologies and coding methods has allowed us to build up our IT systems at minimal cost and also produce an online, multiplayer game of complexity. Ed has previously worked as web developer and coder in a number of Scottish based companies.

I am also a key figure! As the operations Director my number one duty has been to raise the finance for the project and the company. We have been very successful here and Chris and I are an excellent team when presenting to investors. The business model, business plan, business systems were created by me with Chris’s assistance and our success in this area speaks volumes on the quality of the plan we produced. I am also responsible for budgeting, the day to day running of the company, sales, PR and marketing and our relationships with our investors and publishing partners, amongst other things. Inevitably in a small company its important for the people at the top to wear a lot of different hats and Chris and Ed have similarly long lists of responsibilities! Overall, the relationship between myself and Chris and the fact that we both can interchange on each other roles has been fundamental to the success of the company so far. We’re both very driven, passionate and focussed and this is what our investors respond to. They know we’ll never give up.

As for the team itself there are now a total of 16 members with over 100 years industry experience between them. They’re all passionate about games, committed to the company and to the games we make.

Outerlight can be seen as an “independent” player in the games industry, as you develop and publish your own content. This is quite unusual in the games industry. Is your business model a lesson you have learned from looking at the music industry and their struggling majors?

I would not say it’s a lesson learned from the music industry as such although its interesting that you have raised the comparison. We actually made the decision based on our perceptions of the most frequent reason other development companies went bust. We assessed this to be publishers withdrawing support for a project with little warning and with money still due to the developer causing the development company’s collapse. This seems to be an established pattern in the games industry and in fact this often a way for publishers and other developers to pick up valuable IP and almost finished game projects cheaply. Of course, publisher’s may have every reason to withdraw their support and some may have been in financial difficulties themselves however we felt that it would be a great advantage to be independently financed. It is then our responsibility to complete the project on time and to budget. We also decide if the product is good enough.

Another reason we used this tactic is that it is becoming more difficult for new developers to become established because they have no track record. Trying to find a publisher to finance your game project when it’s a unique IP, a unique idea and the studio has never produced a game is very, very hard work. However finding a publisher to distribute an almost finished game project is a much easier process as the product is there to be played. Especially for a game like “The Ship” which is very unusual and modular in form with multilayered game play, much of which will not be in the first release, it seemed simpler to make the game and find publishing partners later.

There are tremendous advantages to being independent and it has allowed us to focus our efforts on our product making it a true labour of love. With more money available to us we could have put more into the game for the first release or polished it more thoroughly but we hope that the public will like what they see and allow us to progress to the sequel with more money behind us.

Today, publishers are being risk averse and are focussing on licenses and sequels. Outerlight has set out to create cutting edge games that are independent and display inventive game play. How difficult is it for you to secure funding in this business environment?

It’s a lot easier to secure funding in the business environment than from games publishers as a new company. However I do not think this is true of many developers. The business world is very different to the games world. For example it is perfectly acceptable to dress very casually and even alternatively in the games world but little success will be found in the investment community unless you look the part. Investors do not have a huge amount of interest in the product which may seem counter intuitive but all they really want to know is that you understand your market and that the returns will be good. Business language is also very important. Investors are interested in profit, a good return on their money, and you must be able to produce an excellent description of your business strategy with financial models to back up your proposal. A knowledge of accounting is very valuable and a good understanding of the legalities of investment is vital if you are to hold onto any equity!

Another point to make is that we deliberately chose an “investor friendly” game. Investors are very averse to hyper violent or hyper sexualised game content in our perception and all our investors checked the game content with us. We also picked a game which we could describe to investors as an “elevator pitch” and which they could be enthused by. The art style, the game concept and the game progression were all acceptable to the investment community where some of our other ideas would have been much harder to pitch in a positive way.

What else distinguishes you from your competitors?

I don’t think there are many companies out there like Outerlight. The company is lead from the top and the directors have a very specific vision for where they want the company to go. We have a business person (myself) right at the top of the company along with a technical guru (Ed) both supporting Chris who knows games inside out and has the passion to move us forward. These “three heads” combine to give us an excellent base for decision making and with the support of our key investors we have a broad knowledge base with games, our product, right at the heart of everything. Many games companies are either lead by coders or workers and therefore lack business knowledge or are lead by business people with no games knowledge. Often one person at the top of the tree has to manage the game projects and all key business decisions, an almost impossible job. Also we have worked to a business plan from the start, and largely we are still on track bar a few delays and hiccups. I think many companies start up with no real idea of where they want to get to and Outerlight has always been working towards very ambitious goals. I think the fact that we set ourselves such high goals has enabled us to work miracles and I am very hopeful that this pattern will continue. We have always tried to be trendsetters, not trend followers and in behaving in this way you always take risks. But without risk there are no big rewards.

Outerlight uses digital distribution exclusively at the early stages of the release, so the game will only be available for download some time before it hits the shops. Do you consider the digital distribution model as the key to “the future”?

Overall, yes. I think the music industry is showing the way here and games are starting to follow. A year ago digital distribution was hardly discussed in games: now its everywhere. Valve, owners of the Steam network where our game will be distributed, are market leaders here and we’re very lucky to be associated with them. There are still some consumers out there who like to have a box for a game along with the manual but I do think that the industry must move in the direction of downloadable content. The digital distribution model can be much more advantageous to the developer in terms of their share of profits on a game release. On average a retailer takes 50% of a the box price on any game and the remainder is divided between the publisher, the developer and other partners. Digital distribution can reduce cost for the consumer and increase profits for the developer: surely a happy outcome for all concerned. The price of game products is certainly a bone of contention amongst the game playing public and games will reach a broader demographic if unit prices can be lowered from the £40 mark to something more inline with DVD prices. The majority of publishing companies are starting to develop digital distribution portals so there is every reason to suppose that downloads are the way forward for all concerned.

Outerlight focuses on game design and considers games to be an interactive entertainment medium. In addition to the digital distribution model you have in place, will we soon be seeing games like The Ship on other platforms like iTunes or Napster?

I am not sure how a game could be put onto a platform like iTunes or Napster unless they were available to be downloaded from these platforms. The issue I can perceive here would be that on average a game is a pretty big download and also for a PC game like “The Ship” users must not only have a high spec PC with a games capable graphics card but they must also have all the right drivers etc installed. This means there are barriers to entry for many users, especially those amongst us who are not technically minded! I think this will be improved with the launch of Microsoft’s new Windows platform: Vista. The new platform aims to make PC gaming more user friendly and more inline with console gaming and its simple “plug and play” mechanic. Vista will download the drivers and patches you require in the background when you load up a game product and should make things a lot simpler for the user.

I would love to see games available for download on more mainstream channels but “The Ship” as a product which is built on an advanced engine with high end graphics may take longer to be available than the “casual games” which are available on the internet. Hopefully in the future as games become more mainstream it will be easier to buy a “games ready” PC and good graphics cards and physics cards will be included as a matter of course on PC’s by mainstream retailers enabling games like “The Ship” to become available to everyone. We’ll also be porting the game to other platforms like consoles (Xbox, Xbox360), handhelds and mobiles which will make it much more accessible.

The Scottish development community is in a healthy state at the moment. Last year, during the annual Edinburgh Interactive Games Festival, Scotland was being touted as “…the new Japan”. Do you feel that this image is an accurate reflection of the state of the industry?

Scotland has an excellent reputation worldwide as a home of top class game development and I am sure that we will maintain this reputation in the future despite a few recent upheavals.

The Scottish Development industry has had a few shocks this year given that two major players in the industry have gone under in the last six months: Visual Science a company of 10 years standing with big titles behind them and a staff of 100 people and DC Studios, again a major player. Both of these losses were not only sad but also very alarming for us as a new developer. I remember being invited to a dinner by Scottish Enterprise two years ago attended by the majority of the games companies in Scotland and many of the companies at the table are no longer running. To set against that we do have some very healthy development companies including Dave Jones’s Real Time Worlds and Denki. Rockstar North, makers of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ are also based in Edinburgh and a number of smaller companies have emerged from the ashes of the old guard. I am hopeful that the industry is still strong here in Scotland and that in the future we will continue to prove our worth through new companies taking the place of the old. Certainly Scottish Developers have been responsible for some of the great titles of the past. And I’m hopeful that “The Ship” will be viewed as a classic in the future.